Says the person who all along wanted to lock up the unaffected "vulnerable" so his lifestyle could remain as hedonistic as ever.

Urban Politician has a point that we need effective contact tracing and isolation procedures for the infected and infectious but that is far from the same as segregating portions of the unaffected population and violating their rights to equal treatment under law, especially when the reason for it is pure selfishness.

Exactly. 95% of the battle is building trust between the patient-provider relationship. If a doctor insists on barging into a patient room in an acute care medical center without a mask, without asking for permission first regarding the patients' mask preferences, they've already lost that trust.

Absolutely. Working out makes you more toned but if you don't watch your diet, you'll have enviable abs under a layer of fat.

I never said that I wouldn't respect a patient's "comfort zone" and refuse a mask if asked. You wouldn't believe the kind of nonsense some hypochondriacs make me bend over backwards for.

I said that "most patients aren't Howard Hughes types like you", and I stand by that. Some patients would probably still want me to wear a mask, but most probably wouldn't mind as more people listen to CDC guidance and get their vaccines.

That's right.

Exercise but eating too much:

https://imageresizer.static9.net.au/...ers-160816.jpg


Versus....


Exercise + strict diet:

https://content.api.news/v3/images/b...8e043382a51ecd

HGH and steroids help too.

Interesting working paper here: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2021-56/
Anecdotally, this squares with my experience of spending more time working to get approximately the same (or less done, since my makeshift home lab is nothing like a real lab). These last few weeks I've been going to campus much more often and it's been great.

Obviously different people will have different experiences, and it's certainly possible for some individuals to be more productive WFH, but clearly this does not generalize to the population.

I wanted to make people responsible for their own well-being, once it became obvious who was vulnerable and who was not, rather than imposing collective punishment so that 80-year-olds didn’t stupidly go do things they shouldn’t or feel left out. That was essentially the approach in Florida, which was correct.

^ Your approach works better in an advanced country where vaccines can get developed and ramped up rather quickly.

But India’s lesson teaches us that the “Florida approach” could be disastrous.

The Indian population are literally sitting ducks to this virus.

Brazil is also an example of that.

Florida’s approach has been like that since about last June, long before vaccines were available. Older people just needed to be careful, wear masks, avoid meeting others indoors, etc. And most importantly, segregate from the young who were around other people for work and/or socially.

The opposite approach is the British/European one, where older people went to shops and pubs and restaurants as soon as they reopened, our 70-year-old senior partners went back to the office (and promptly got Covid), and older people continued to have family and friends around to the house (maskless) throughout.

Governments created such a litany of rules about socialising and closed or restricted so many businesses (reservations only, table service only, limited capacity, etc) that people vulnerable to the virus were lulled into a false sense of security. It would have been better if they had been kept more afraid of the virus.

More generally, the fault was not acknowledging the fact that a minority of people are endangered by the virus and the majority are not. This means that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot work. The rules will be unnecessarily onerous, bordering on laughable, for most people, while being insufficiently strict for others.

For example, opening pubs to everyone with 25% capacity and only table service was the wrong approach. They were still unsafe for the elderly, but also unprofitable for the owners and not really enjoyable for the patrons. They should have been allowed to operate more normally, but with the vulnerable strongly urged* not to go at all.


* Better would be to restrict people over say 65 by rule, especially in a country with a shaky public health system facing nurse shortages and capacity constraints. We’ve argued the legality of this ad nauseam on this forum, but frankly it’s no more of an illegal overreach than much of what governments have ordered over the past 14 months.

^ I’m the first to agree with you, against the grain of this forum, that Government generally makes things worse when they try too hard to police and micromanage everyday life. Even during the worst of the pandemic I think we could have had equal results from simply banning large gatherings and otherwise using strong social messaging to encourage people to wear masks and maintain social distancing, with particular emphasis on advising people over 65 to stay at home as much as possible.

I can’t stand the fact that some Governors can just do whatever they want on the basis of declaring a perpetual “State of Emergency”. It’s utter BS, it goes against the whole idea of checks and balances as laid out in our Constitution.

^ Exactly.

But I would also hope that in retrospect people realize the error in just thinking everyone needed to do (or not do) the same things regardless of personal circumstances.

There was all this talk of creating “Covid safe” environments, but we all know that isn’t possible. A shop full of people wearing masks and encouraged to maintain 6 foot social distancing may be a bit safer than a shop full of people not wearing masks, but not by much. And on the flip side most people were never in any danger at all. Government messaging was just all wrong, because they didn’t want to offend the damn Boomers.

Cue Pedestrian trying to claim that lots of young people are dying or facing lifelong disability due to Covid... :rolleyes:

Oh I got a good one.....what use is even going to the bar when nothing works? It's almost every day there is new material about covid damaging something in the body like taste, smell, blood vessels, ect. I will view any downplaying as a lie, because all men want their stuff to work, and all fear the loss.
Source

Was in NYC yesterday and the city is much much busier. Noticed dramatic increase since 4 weeks ago of folks and traffic. Also a ton of folks, I mean a ton of folks that are maskless. Big difference yesterday versus a month ago.

Its time for places to return employees to the office in mass. I'm not fully happy until every street and side walk is people gridlock and traffic hell. "Blocking the box" is a sign of a healthy city!


https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/busin...5655a33fa.jpeg

This was the Sheep Meadow at Central Park yesterday:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...peg?authuser=0
Credit: mine

The picture looks less crowded than it actually was.

That looks awesome. Glad we are gradually returning to the “old normal”.

Nonsense. Covid will only “damage blood vessels” in the case of very serious disease which young people don’t get.

All of these stories take rare or anecdotal examples and try to blow it up into a general concern to frighten younger people. But it has an element of “the boy who cried Wolf” about it. People aren’t that stupid, and the more they try to downplay the very age- and health-dependent impacts of the virus, the more people just believe the whole thing is a “scamdemic”.

Better to just say “look, this virus is very dangerous to the elderly, the obese and the immune-compromised, more so than even a bad flu strain, so please wear a mask in public places where you might be around such people, and keep your distance from elderly relatives”. That would have been perfectly reasonable and rational guidance. And again, not visiting grandma was always more important than not dining indoors.

No. Conspiracy theory.
The article said "Coronavirus infection is already known to damage blood vessels" so you're gonna need to give a source to dispute the article. If you have two articles vs my one article....would be harder for me to dispute.

The younger people will accept the fear of erectile disfunction and the CDC should team up with the MSM and run with it. Or give em money.

Nonsense.
Ok that's kinda unfair, but I'm seeing how it works.

It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s “fair”. If you think it’s unfair you should take it up with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or with the whole process of ageing that weakens the immune system in later life, or with the people whose own poor diets and exercise habits made them obese and therefore less able to fight off the infection as well. It is what it is.

If anything, it’s unfair to impose a sort of society-wide collective punishment for over a year, when the lives of most people could have been improved greatly by encouraging greater caution amongst a minority.

The old have lived their lives. They enjoyed their 20s, 30s end 40s. They could have stayed home for a bit longer, for their own well-being, and we could have avoided subsequent lockdowns after the initial (and necessary) one last spring. That’s all there is to it.